Rob’s Roundup: YouTube music App, Happier Without Facebook, Mobile Still the King

This week we’ll take a look at YouTube’s long-awaited music app, a study that finds people are happier when they leave Facebook, and another report that says – you guessed it – people hate a bad mobile phone experience.

YouTube Music App

While not a replacement for Google Play Music (that’s a different service, much like Spotify or Pandora), YouTube Music is part of the YouTube Red brand. You can pay $9.99 a month to get ad-free viewing and listening to YouTube, as well as the audio-only mode and offline play in YouTube Music.
If you decide not to go the $9.99 a month route, you can still use the service but, it switches to ‘free’ mode, which obviously has ads and removes a number of features.

With trending tracks and an approach Google calls “Never Let Go”, the idea is that you watch/listen to videos and music…and don’t stop.
“An endless music experience. It’s high reward and low effort for users,” said Sowmya Subramanian, engineering director at YouTube.

New Study Shows That You Don’t Really Like Facebook

The constant stream of status updates in Facebook can be a little overwhelming, be it from friends, family, people you didn’t really want to add to Facebook but couldn’t figure out a way to politely turn down so you have them set to a low privacy setting, and of course co-workers.

A new study from the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen reveals that quitting Facebook makes you happier and less stressed. In order to find out what that steady barrage of lunch pics, event invites, announcements and anniversaries were really doing to us the HRI split up 1,095 Facebook users and split them into two groups. One group was allowed to continue using it on a daily basis, the other had to stop completely.

The results are a little wild – after one week 88% of the group the left said they felt ‘happy’ as opposed to 81% in the group still using it. They also felt less angry, less lonely, less depressed and more decisive – one woman gained the ability to fly short distances. Kidding, but the numbers, even in such a small, targeted study, are telling.

Bad phone experiences are like advertising for your competitor

I feel like I’m covering old ground here, but for some reason, brands are having trouble with this one – the customer’s user experience is everything. We’ve talked about how not being mobile can hurt your business in a past Roundup, and recent studies have shown how few companies are responding to people via social media.

While we go on and on about new technology, the reality is that a company has to cover all the bases. And that includes something as simple as phone calls. While it’s tempting (and efficient) to use automated systems, the numbers are against you: a recent study shows that negative phone experiences with businesses have significant impacts on ROI and loyalty.

In fact, an August 2015 survey, of over 2,000 adults found nearly 75% were more inclined to choose a competitor after a negative phone experience – and 30% were more likely to leave a negative review.

While this isn’t a call to fix everything at once, it’s more an opportunity to point out that we live in a complicated ecosystem, where a bad phone call can lead to a poor online review and social media complaints, which can then get picked up by other people via social media, added as part of a search engine’s ranking algorithm, and on and on.